Hans Frank

**Hans Michael Frank** (*23 May 1900 – 16 October 1946*) was a German *Nazi* politician and lawyer who rose from a modest middle‑class family in Karlsruhe to become one of Adolf Hitler’s closest legal advisers and subsequently the head of the occupied General Government in Poland. After serving briefly in the Imperial German Army during World I, he studied law at the Universities of Munich and Kiel, earning his doctorate in 1924. A fervent member of the German Workers’ Party from 1919, Frank participated in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and later founded the National Socialist German Jurists Association, representing the Nazi Party in thousands of legal cases. By 1933 he had been appointed Bavarian Minister of Justice, made a Reichsleiter, and entered Hitler’s cabinet as a Reichsminister without portfolio, while also presiding over the Academy for German Law, which he used to align the German legal system with Nazi racial ideology.

In October 1939 Frank was installed as Governor‑General of the General Government, where he oversaw the systematic persecution, forced labour, and mass murder of Polish civilians and Jews, supervising the establishment of four extermination camps. His administration enforced ghettoisation, deportations, and the exploitation of millions of victims, policies that resulted in the deaths of over four million people under his jurisdiction. Captured by American forces in May 1945, he was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and executed by hanging in October 1946. While awaiting death he converted to Catholicism and penned memoirs that attempted to shift responsibility onto Hitler and the SS, but the extensive documentary record, including his own diaries, sealed his historical infamy.*